By Matthew Gilbert, Editor-in-Chief Institute of Noetic Sciences

In 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell achieved the dream of a lifetime – space exploration and a mission to the moon. What he didn’t anticipate was a return trip that triggered something even more powerful: a profound inner sense of universal connectedness. He wrote of that experience:

“When I went to the moon, I was as pragmatic a test pilot, engineer, and scientist as any of my colleagues. But when I saw the planet Earth floating in the vastness of space...the presence of divinity became almost palpable, and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes.”

That personal epiphany soon became Mitchell’s next mission – “To broaden the knowledge of the nature and potentials of mind and consciousness, and to apply that knowledge to the enhancement of human well-being and the quality of life on the planet” – and in 1973 he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) to explore the relationship between our inner and outer worlds. Noetic, from the Greek word noetikos, means “inner/intuitive knowing.”

A History of Breakthroughs

During the past three decades, the Institute has investigated the nature of consciousness with scientific rigor and from numerous perspectives while working with an exemplary group of frontier researchers throughout the world. Significant projects initiated and/or partially funded by IONS during that time include:

* Remote Viewing research by Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International).

* Research on anomalous interactions between consciousness and matter by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory in Princeton University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

* Research on the use of visualization as an adjunct therapy for terminally ill cancer patients by O. Carl Simonton and Stephanie Matthews-Simonton at the Cancer Counseling and Research Center in Fort Worth, Texas.

* The Causality Project, an investigation into core metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality that was led by Willis Harman and included several Nobel laureates.

* The Inner Mechanisms of the Healing Response program, which sought to identify the parameters of an innate healing system through studies in psychoneuroimmunology, spontaneous remission, spiritual healing, and bioenergetics. This program was a forerunner to the field of mind-body medicine.

* The Intentionality Program, a series of small seed grants and international forums which launched the field of research into the impacts of prayer and intention on healing.

* The Heart of Healing, a six-hour television documentary aired on TBS (Turner Broadcasting System) and hosted by Jane Seymour on the role of the mind and spirit in healing, co-produced by IONS and based on the same-titled IONS book. The program sparked the development of hundreds of IONS “community groups” throughout the U.S. and worldwide.

The Institute has also published or helped to publish a variety of books that have introduced the general public to consciousness research, mind-body health, and related fields. They include Psychic Exploration by Edgar Mitchell; Health for the Whole Person by James Fadiman, James Gordon and Arthur Hastings; Higher Creativity, Global Mind Change and Creative Work by Willis Harman; In the Footsteps of Gandhi by Catherine Ingram; Waking Up by Charles Tart; Drawing the Light From Within by Judith Cornell; The Home Planet by Kevin Kelley; The Feminine Face of God by Sherry Ruth Anderson and Patricia Hopkins; and Spontaneous Remission: An Annotated Bibliography by Brendan O’Regan and Caryle Hirshberg.

Recent projects at IONS continue to focus on the interplay of mind and matter, collaborating with other like-spirited scientists and organizations in an interdisciplinary approach to problem-solving, and communicating relevant findings to a growing audience of people eager for new-paradigm thinking. Some of these projects include:

* The Transformation Program, co-directed by vice-president of research Marilyn Mandala Schlitz and faculty member Cassandra Vieten, which interviewed more than 40 leading teachers of transformation and surveyed hundreds of individuals in order to begin developing a model of personal transformation and worldview change.

* Entangled Minds, an ongoing series of in-house and collaborative laboratory experiments led by Senior Researcher Dean Radin to explore the nature of parapsychology and non-local reality as they relate to interconnectedness. A book by the same name will be published by Simon & Schuster in April 2006. (Look for an interview with Dean in the upcoming Bleep sequel, Down the Rabbit Hole.)

* The What the Bleep Do We Know Study Guide, the companion volume to the hit movie, written, compiled, and edited by the IONS staff and other professionals and co-created with Captured Light Distribution.

* Consciousness & Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind-Body Medicine, a new book/DVD package edited by Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, IONS faculty member Tina Amorok, and Marc Micozzi. The book brings together 64 of the foremost authorities on holistic medicine, among them Deepak Chopra, Candace Pert, Larry Dossey, Ken Wilber, and Rachel Naomi Remmen, who discuss the power of bringing an integral perspective to modern medical practice.

* The renaming of its quarterly membership journal to Shift: At the Frontiers of Consciousness, still a 48-page, four-color magazine charting news, data, opinions, and experiences from the interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies.

The New Frontier

Since the Institute was founded back in 1973, much of its original mission has been realized. Parapsychology, for example, is no longer considered a parlor game but a phenomenon with relevance to a growing number of traditional fields of interest, from biology to medicine. The impact of the mind on health and healing has been firmly established. Individual consciousness is proving to be “entangled” with the consciousness of others, and the notion of interconnectedness is finding a basis in physical reality – look no further than the remarkable findings of quantum physics.